Naxos also publish the unabridged novels of Haruki Murakami, including his fantastical A Wild Sheep Chase (£32/£28.99) and the magnificent (and raunchy) The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (£65/ £58.50). Murakami is hyper-aware of sound (“A slight change of mood can do amazing things to a person’s voice”) and his astonishing characters jump into even more startling life when their voices are conjured up by Rupert Degas. Get a taste of his skills and those of Stevenson at naxosaudiobooks.com, which offers downloads at around two-thirds of the price of CD sets.

A shy British hero, a ravishing clever heroine, a panoply of subplots, villains, volcanoes, true love and accordion music are mouth-wateringly combined with Italian cooking in Anthony Capella’s The Wedding Officer (Time Warner, £15.99/£14.39). RichardE. Grant narrates with panache.

Eva Rice’s The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets (Headline, £17.99/£16.19) deserves a place next to I Capture the Castle and The Little White Horse in the romantic pantheon. The 18-year-old Penelope and her younger brother Inigo rattle around in a crumbling mansion with a beautiful young mother desperately trying to cope with death duties after their father dies in the war.

A chance encounter provides Penelope with new friends, including Harry, a moody magician set on getting his revenge on the girl who has spurned him. Will he notice Penelope? Rosamund Pike, the narrator, is convincingly Fifties.

Any P. G. Wodehouse lover will revel in Robert McCrum’s Wodehouse: A Life (Audiobook Collection, £25.99 (tapes £20.99), from 01225 443400 or audiobookcollection.com), an illuminating and sympathetic profile of the benign writer of the funniest novels in English.

Humour, much of it black, is also to the fore in Bill Bryson’s memoir of a baby-boomer’s childhood The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (BBC, £25/£22.50), read unabridged and with jaunty irony by Bryson himself.

Finally, John Betjeman: A First-Class Collection (BBC, £12.99/£11.99) is an elegant centenary tribute to the poet who hymned bronzed Amazons with flippant awe and poked sardonic fun at cads in teashops, but was also an effective and elegiac champion of Victorian achievements. The range of his poems in style and subject is emphasised by five contrasting narrators: Derek Jacobi, Stephen Fry, Miriam Margoyles, Susan Jameson and Samuel West.

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